74 SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF THE ORGANISM 



identification or simple remembrance of sameness depends 

 only in part on stimulation, and is in the main an active 

 trying on the part of the Ego according to probability. 1 

 We shall come back to this point later on. 



So much, for the present, about the " individuality of 

 correspondence " in its bearing on vitalism. 



It always is an agreeable occurrence when two in- 

 vestigators in the same scientific field independently arrive 

 at almost the same results, and as some such independent 

 but contemporaneous discoveries have been made in the 

 subject that we are now considering, I should like to ask 

 your permission to say a few words about them. It was in 

 the spring of 1903 that I first published the argument 

 forming a new and independent proof of vitalism, which I 

 just have explained to you, and it was at about the same 

 time that the late philosopher Busse, in his book, Geist und 

 Korper, Seele und Leib, brought forward an argument against 

 so-called psycho -physical parallelism, which is almost 

 identical with my analysis down to the smallest details ; 

 and we knew nothing at all about one another. Busse uses 

 a telegram as his instance, where I use a conversation, but 

 that is the only difference. Later on we shall see that 

 proving the autonomy of life, as revealed in acting, is 

 indeed the same as defeating the parallelism-theory. 



But there is still another case of independent argument 

 to be mentioned. I was very glad to learn after this 

 chapter was written that one of the most original thinkers 

 of the present day, the French philosopher Henri Bergson, 

 in his profound analysis of the relation between Matitore et 



1 Compare Bergson, and also the paper of von Kries : Ucber die matericllen 

 Grundlaycn der Bewusstseins-Erscheinungen, Tubingen, 1901. 



